Superior: The Return of Race Science

by Angela Saini

‘We have two nested fallacies here,’ Jonathan Marks continues. The first is that the human species comes packaged up in a small number of discrete races, each with their own different traits. ‘Second is the idea that there are innate explanations for political and economic inequality. And basically what you’re doing there is saying that inequality exists, but it doesn’t represent historical injustice. What these guys are trying to do is manipulate science to construct imaginary boundaries to social progress.’

Whenever anybody tells you I am objective, I am apolitical, that is the time to watch your wallet. Because you’re about to have your pocket picked.’

what population geneticists like Cavalli-Sforza quickly noticed was that there are no hard genetic boundaries around human groups, but rather continuous statistical variation, with a good deal of overlap. What differences there are exist along gradients, not borders. But that said, variation isn’t random either. It can, depending on how you look at it, fall into clusters in which certain genes are statistically more

This conceptual loophole in population genetics – the fact that we’re all different as individuals but that there is also some apparent order to this diversity – is what has since been seized upon by people with racist agendas. Gannett calls it ‘statistical racism’.

‘What they have a more difficult time reckoning with is that even something like population genetics is a science done by people, working with the assumptions and the ideas that are available at the time.’ Such scientists may believe themselves to be free of racism, but they can’t help thinking about humans in racial terms.

Dismantling the edifice of race is about more than just tweaking language, it is about fundamentally rewriting the way we think about human difference, to resist the urge to group people at all.

It advised scientists to resist the temptation to use their work to shore up any kind of political ideology, whether racist or anti-racist. ‘Racism,’ it reminded them in case they had forgotten, is ‘socially and politically constructed.’ Science is just a pawn in the bloody game.

It’s an error to assume that the internal differences are as profound as the external ones appear. But it’s an easy one to make. ‘If we could see each other by looking at our genomes then, without a big computer, you would be hard pushed to work out whether somebody was from India or from Poland,’

‘There is relatively little genetic differentiation between southern India and Ireland. I mean, relatively similar ancestry components. But of course, the pigmentation differences are quite large, and so people assume that these people are massively different genetically.’

The true human story, then, appears to be not of pure races rooted in one place for tens of thousands of years, but of constant mixing, with migration both one way and another. The cherished belief that people in certain places have looked the same way for millennia has to give way to the understanding that migration made the world a melting pot long before the last few centuries, long before the multicultural societies we have today.

Confirmed by genetics, these ancient connections can be spotted in the words we use. Linguists long ago saw similarities between European and Indian tongues, describing them together as Indo-European languages. Genetics has added more hard data to the history. Almost all Indians today are genetically connected to Europeans by their ancient ancestors who spread the Yamnaya culture, as well as the earlier farmers migrating from the Middle East.

Now, just pause to think about what this means: the symbol we associate with ancient Britain, the one thing that couldn’t really be more authentically British, was built by people who are certainly not the main ancestors of those who consider themselves indigenous Brits today.

‘Most researchers, including geneticists, agree that “race” is a socially constructed category … There is no categorical imperative in biology, and no need or value in placing people in biological boxes. There are subtle genetic correlations with geographic origin, and physical traits, as well as medical ones, and understanding those correlations is important. But there are no hard borders, just gentle gradients,’ he tells me. ‘Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop people “racialising” others, and perhaps that reflects our desire to categorise. Most categories are nonsense, although some may be useful. “Race” is useless, pernicious nonsense.’

We have plenty of data on racial gaps in, for example, income, health and schooling in the UK and the United States. This is because race has been accepted by academics as a social reality, not a biological one. Race affects how we live, but not who we are genetically.

But that freedom would have to come with responsibility. As the devastating mistakes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries proved, race research never goes well when society is racist. And although Reich insists that biological data as it stands makes racism impossible, I’m not so sure.

I wonder what Reich took away from this encounter. If understanding the scientific facts makes it so impossibly difficult to be racist, how does James Watson manage it?

Indeed the myth of American exceptionalism is so pervasive that an entire scientific theory exists to explain it, weaving in archaeology and anthropology with the notion that Europeans are the ultimate bearers of human progress. It’s known as the Solutrean hypothesis.

It’s a narrative they thought gave them a moral claim to the land, and later helped to square the inhuman treatment and murder of Native Americans with the squeaky-clean founding values of the United States.

By the time the Nazis came to power, Kossinna was dead. But the Third Reich had already nurtured his theories, seizing upon his argument that culture and ethnicity were wrapped up in each other.

he tells me that he was drawn into email correspondence with a respectable Canadian sociologist with a professorship at a public university who had cited his research. As they emailed each other, it slowly became clear to him that this man had views sympathetic to white supremacists. ‘Everything can be twisted,’ Kristiansen warns me. ‘Everything.’

The Past as Present, historian Romila Thapar explains that the idea of a Hindu homeland has its roots in the struggle against British colonialism and efforts to construct a new national identity once independence was won.

Some have absorbed old European and American theories of an ancient, noble, pure-blooded Aryan race, and claim that these Aryans did indeed originate in India, living in the sophisticated cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation towards north-western India thousands of years ago. As the Nazis saw themselves, they see modern-day Hindus, particularly light-skinned, higher caste Hindus living mainly in northern India, as direct descendants of the Aryans.

The legends include tales of demons, flying machines, monkey-headed and elephant gods. The nationalists say these weren’t just beautiful allegories, but hard historical details.

When we claim ethnic or racial pride, what are we doing but trying to piggyback on the achievements of those who went before us? It’s not enough to be who we are now, to be good human beings in the present. The power of nationalism is that it calls to the part of us that doesn’t want to accept being ordinary. It tells people that they are descended from greatness, that they have been genetically endowed with something special, something passed down to them over the generations.

Inter-caste marriage was legalised in 1954, yet a survey in 2016 found that as many as 40 per cent of adults in Delhi who didn’t belong to the lowest castes thought there should again be laws preventing it.

when I was flat hunting in Delhi before starting my first job there as a reporter, I was asked to list my skin shade on the rental form. Having thought of myself only as ‘brown’ for most of my life, I had no idea what to write. The letting agent took a good look at me, and with a dirty smile scribbled, ‘wheatish’. Colour takes on a new subtlety when every degree of pigmentation matters.

‘Clearly certain communities have certain biological abilities which they are born with … we all look different and we each have our own strengths and abilities.’ For him, the differences are so profound that castes are analogous to separate races, as population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza might have defined them.

By observing the similarities between identical twins, researchers have for decades thought they might be able to discern whether certain traits were potentially more heritable than others.

The problem with studies of adopted twins, as critics have noted, is that they usually involve children of fairly comfortable socioeconomic means. Even if the siblings are raised apart, they’re unlikely to be at the poorest end of society, where the lack of good nutrition and a stable home life may be factors in their upbringing. They tend to go to fairly good schools. There’s a risk, then, that these studies underestimate the role of environment across the true range of how people live.

Turkheimer compares intelligence to marriage. Psychologists know that if you have an identical twin who has been divorced, you are more likely to be divorced yourself. There is no suggestion that there’s such a thing as a gene for divorce, because people understand this to be a complex outcome, influenced by countless factors, social as well as to do with personality and temperament.

The effects of slavery and centuries of racism, in all its forms, are hard to quantify, but African Americans have undoubtedly suffered in ways that have left their mark on generations.

Exceptionally smart parents are likely to have children a little less smart than themselves because of a phenomenon known as regression to the mean, which works to bring everyone in a population back closer to the average. Very bright children are likelier to emerge from parents in the middle of the intelligence range, where most people live. This was precisely the statistical fact that made eugenics impossible.

The black and mixed-ancestry children adopted into white families had IQs thirteen points higher than those adopted into black families.

He believes that research like this strongly indicates that environmental factors could well account for the entire black–white IQ gap in the United States. Even for those who claim to show contradictory evidence, he notes, ‘it is literally impossible to raise Black, White and mixed-race children in identical environments if racism itself is a significant environmental factor.’

In the United Kingdom, the group that achieves the lowest grades at GCSE level is white working-class boys, followed by white working-class girls. Scientists haven’t jumped to claim that low intelligence is rooted in whiteness.

By isolating themselves, populations have formed tight bonds, but the smaller groups have also burdened themselves with higher genetic risks. Racial ‘purity’ comes at a high price.

In the same way that our parents pass on their genes to us, they also pass on their culture, their habits, their ways of thinking and doing things. And this can happen over generations. It is so sticky and persistent that it can seem biological to an observer. This is why measuring differences between groups, even over long periods of time, is laden with error. We are social beings, not just biological ones.

Of almost 48,000 articles they found on race and health, only 2,000 mentioned the word ‘racism’ even once. It seems easier to believe that our bodies are different than to accept that our social circumstances are. The notion of black exceptionalism runs right through the history of American medicine,

doctor named Clarence Grim came up instead with what became known as the ‘slavery hypertension hypothesis’ – the theory, later championed by Harvard economist Roland Fryer, that black Americans are naturally predisposed to retain more salt because of a rapid process of natural selection on the slave ships that brought their ancestors to the New World.

As scientists struggled to find the genetic evidence they thought must be out there, one team led by a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health decided to look at factors other than race that might correlate with high blood pressure. They discovered that level of education, which often correlates with income and social class, was a far better predictor of hypertension in an individual than the percentage of African ancestry they had. Each year of education was associated with an extra half millimetre of mercury decrease in blood pressure readings.

For Cooper, the popularity of Grim’s fairytale, the slavery hypertension hypothesis, betrays how some Americans would rather have a fanciful biological explanation for racial difference than a social one.

Hypertension, he says, is a case of science being retrofitted to accommodate race. The data, the theories, the facts themselves, are rotated and warped until they fit into a racial framework we can relate to. This is the power of race. It is the power to twist science to its own ends.

BiDil set a precedent. Seeing its success with the Food and Drug Administration, pharmaceutical firms began to file patent applications for other treatments that had been shown to work better in certain racial and ethnic groups. Looking at US patent applications filed between 2001 and 2005, the years before BiDil’s approval, Kahn found that 65 mentioned race or ethnicity. Between 2006 and 2016, there were 384 that did.

American paediatrician Richard Garcia once described the case of a friend who as a child repeatedly failed to receive a correct diagnosis for cystic fibrosis because it was thought to be a white disease, and she was black. Only when a passing radiologist happened to spot her chest X-ray, without knowing to whom it belonged, was her condition instantly spotted. She had to wait until she was eight years old, and her colour had to be invisible, before she could be diagnosed.

The researchers’ original data on airway inflammation showed no significant differences between white and black patients. So they chose to control for factors including lung function and degree of control of the disease, as well as body mass index, age and gender, until finally they came up with adjusted data that showed there was a small but significant difference between black and white patients, that black people’s airways responded to asthma in a uniquely different way.

Many people with perfectly good intentions end up committing a lot of statistical errors because of lack of training and something we call wish bias, which is this idea that you want to find something interesting so you keep sifting through the data and fishing around until you find something interesting.

The habit of collecting data by racial or ethnic group has the unintended consequence of driving researchers to use it, hunting for gaps and trying any means possible to explain those gaps.

In the attempt to understand racial disparities in health, social data sometimes gets treated as though it is biological data. Census categories are transformed into genetic groups.

of grant money targeted to this question. If the government is giving you money, saying we want you to answer this question, and this is all people know how to do, then they’re going to answer that question whichever way they know how. So that provides some incentive,’ explains Jay Kaufman. It would be the same if funding agencies suddenly began collecting data by hair colour as well as by race and gender. You would be almost certain to see studies suggesting biological differences between people with brown hair and blonde hair. Just having the data invites comparisons.

In January 2017, independent news organisation ProPublica revealed that Tom Price, a Republican congressman nominated by Donald Trump to become head of the Department of Health and Human Services, had persistently lobbied on behalf of Arbor Pharmaceuticals, which owns the marketing rights to BiDil, to remove a certain study from a government website.